Saturday, February 14, 2009

So...don't all great blogs begin with so? Don't ask me. I've only ever read two others. But I thought I'd start one myself to allow others to follow along in my struggle to get my words into a book, allowing you the reader to laugh behind my back as I send my work off to publishers, struggling to gain some kind of hard earned self-respect only to be rejected time and time again. Follow along, it'll be great.

You can chuckle with your friends as I receive each and every form letter that state things like, "We're sorry for the impersonal response but we wanted to get back to you quickly. Unfortunately, we don't think we're the ideal champion of your manuscript." It's going to be great fun.

That quote above was from [name withheld] Associates, literary agents in New York City. I can't blame them for not liking the proposal or the manuscript. At 23k words. the first book I sent off would be hard to sell, if not impossible. Unless it were a children's book maybe, which it most certainly is not.

A little about me: I started writing this past November and have written two books. The first called False Destiny and the second, Terminal. They are both thriller fiction and works I don't consider half bad, though I admit I may be just a little impartial with my opinion. I've sent off False Destiny to eight different literary agents and received polite but succinct responses, "No thank you." Like I said, I can't blame them.

But my newest book, Terminal, is a whole different anomaly. At 36k words it still isn't a long book. Categorically it's considered a "novella". Now before you think, "Oh, a novella, good luck chuck!" let's consider some great novellas in history. Ever heard of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens? Or Animal Farm by George Orwell? The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka? How about Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck? You guessed it, all novellas. Now, for the record, I'm not comparing myself to these greats, far from it. My writing I would consider highly commercial, contemporary genre fiction without much literary quality. Really. But that's about a third of what I see on the mass market paperback section at my local bookstore, so I think I'm in pretty good company.

So take a seat, if you haven't already, (I wouldn't expect you to be standing at your computer), and get ready to revel in my failure. I mean really, we all secretly want to see someone else struggle while we sit comfortably and point at them. It's been human nature since were were apes runnning around the forest. But the first one to pick up a stick and make a mark in the sand, I think may have been on to something.